Saturday, January 06, 2007

We had a report yesterday evening that our metrics seemed to be out of whack for some feeds, suddenly jumping by significant percentages in some cases.

This was an issue related to a change made recently to enable feeds with no active subscribers to behave better; unfortunately an unnoticed side effect was that when a new reader activated their subscription on other feeds, all subscribers were reported, active or not. So metrics were inadvertently boosted by unsubscribed and pending readers. Those affected will have noticed a significant spike in FeedBlitz subscriber counts reported to third parties in the last couple of days or so.

So. FYI:

The issue was fixed at approximately 11:30 am today (Saturday) and subscriber counts are now being correctly reported all over.

Depending on the service you use, you'll likely see the numbers settle down tomorrow or Monday (e.g. Sunday will be the first day with everything right, so Monday will be the day to check that the metrics you see in a service like Feedburner correspond to the subscriber counts you see in your FeedBlitz dashboard).